Historic sequences of long-term and near-term stock-market studies for the NYSE Composite, DJIA, and NASDAQ indexes, and their predecessors are added as research develops new observations.

Table, c36 Cycle

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The multitude of natural cycles is vast. For practical purposes, the number is infinite. All interact with each other. Some are reasonably visible to anyone, for example the days and nights, seasons, and tides. Others are less obvious, like c36. All are irregular due interactivity and ellipticity. The 36-year cycle is prefixed with a "c" to indicate this irregularity ("c" standing for circa which in Latin, as my ecclesiastical contemporaries know or used to know, means "around" or "about" or "approximately").

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c36 in the stock market has some very interesting characteristics which are relevant at this time (year 2001+). They appear in this table.

The current episode has some cycle characteristics similar to those of 1892. This suggests that the high in the current market may have already occurred some months back in the year 2000 and that the decline may carry the market 40 to 50% lower and then defer reaching new highs again until 2007 or beyond.

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There was no NASDAQ during the previous cycles. Therefore the analysis pertains to the Dow Jones Industrials Average and Standard & Poor's 500 Composite Index. The NASDAQ Composite since its inception has always been more volatile; therefore its decline in value from its peak already is or will be considerably worse than those of the other two.

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The episode of December 26,1821, does not fit well with the others. Its peak value was coincident with its date. And, in further contrast, its maximum decline was -14%, part of an 11-year, wide swinging trading range before the next, big new highs. Chart

Similar to c36, this long-term cycle recurs over the past 200 years in the stock market with enough regularity to merit attention. The big caveat is the number of all these long-term observations is too few for rigor in a statistical conclusion.

Taking both c28 and c36 (above) into consideration, the general profile for the year 2001 and the environment for the following years appears to be one of large up and down price volatility in limited bull markets unlike the steady, dramatic progress of the great, repetitively rising, superb bull markets of the last two centuries in the United States, 1813, 1921, 1949, and 1982.

As I mentioned on the Home page of this section, the notion of alternation has been around for many years--probably thousands. It is hard to miss. Everywhere you look you perceive cyclic alternation--breathing, pulse, weather, relationships among people and nations, and so on.

Whatever man perceives, he measures. So it is unsurprising that he measures time with respect to alternating phenomena. How much time elapses between the observable repititions of defined events?

Research along these lines in stock-price cycles is beset with at least two obvious limitations, q.v., plus a third: the difficulty of mathematically defining the similarities in a series of events to determine that they possess enough comparable identity to justify inclusion in a time-sequential measurement study.

Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to examine and define the presence and extent of types of cycles in stock-market price behavior.